The Dog that Didn't Bark

It may seem a bit late to post on last year's elections.  I had planned to do so much earlier but was overtaken by events.  But now that the Democrat has won for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, it seems like a good time to finally get to it.  

Last year's mid term elections were good news at (almost) all levels.  Consider.

Democrats vastly outperformed either the polls or the usual midterm results.

Democrats actually expanded their US Senate seats by one, and held their losses in the House to a manageable level. What does this mean?  Well, there will be a legislative check on the Republican House to prevent it from doing anything too crazy.  Also, the Senate can continue to confirm and there will be no excuse for large executive or judicial backlogs.  And it can counter any investigations the House comes up with by holding investigations of its own.

Secretary of State results

Democrats finally realized the error of putting all their eggs in the federal basket and started seriously competing at the state level.*  And not just state governors, either.  Democrats are also recognizing that success at the national level depends on success at all levels in the states.  Democrats managed to flip four state legislatures in key midwestern swing states, greatly reducing the risk of state legislatures selecting their own slates of electors next time around.  They also held onto the Secretary of State position in all key swing states except for Georgia, where the Republican incumbent had proven himself willing to respect election outcomes.**

Furthermore, maximum crazy turned out not to be a winning strategy for Republicans.  While plenty of crazies won, many crazies won the primary and went on to lose in the general. Sane Republicans did fairly well.  Some have even talked about flexing their muscle in Congress, though they show no signs of actually acting on this promise. 

While running on a democracy is in danger platform proved to abstract to be effective for Democrats on a national basis, in the key swing states where the Republican assault on democracy is strongest, warning of this local threat did turn out to be successful. Particularly at the level of Secretary of State, the official in charge of certifying elections, running on a promise to respect election results regardless of who wins proved to be a better message than running on a program of throwing out results one does not like.

Of course, not everything was good news.  Republicans won the House of Representatives and are in the process of competing to see who can be craziest.  And given the strong rural/urban divide in this country, with counties being geographic rather than demographic units, it seems likely that it will be a long time before Democrats can compete at the county level.  Given the importance of counties in counting votes, as well as "constitutional sheriffs," this is a serious concern.  I attended an Indivisible Rural Caucus Zoom meeting to discuss the aftermath in which they discussed the most successful strategies in rural areas.  The most successful candidates were well-known in their local communities, had strong community ties, addressed local issues, and built local organizations. All of this should be completely unsurprising and unremarkable, but if it convinces rural Democratic activists to focus on this sort of retail politics instead of policing ideological purity, it is all to the good.

But best of all is the dog that didn't bark -- the way this election proceeded as a completely normal election in contrast to 2020.  No militias turned out to intimidate Democratic voters. Michigan election watchers did not engage in the disruptions they had discussed.  Defeated candidates conceded.  Certifying bodies followed their usual duties.  There was significant doubt as to whether this would happen.  But even in real areas of concern, all went smoothly -- completely normally.

Heavily Republican Navajo and Mohave Counties in Arizona certified the results.  Cochise County, Arizona delayed, but ultimately yielded to a judge's order and certified, allowing the Secretary of State to make a timely certification.

Other states proceeded more smoothly.

Nye County, Nevada insisted on a hand count, only to learn the hard way the value of counting machines. There were similar calls in Torrance County, New Mexico and other rural New Mexico counties, but in the end all New Mexico counties, even Otero County, which had refused to certify the primary, made timely certifications of the election results.  In Michigan, all elections must be certified by a board consisting of two members of each party. Although Republicans had ousted board members certifying Biden as the winner, certification of Democratic wins in 2022 went off without a hitch. In Pennsylvania three counties refused to count mail-in ballots in the primary until ordered by a court.  In the general election, however, only Luzerne County dragged its feet in certifying the outcome, and only because the election ran out of ballots before it was finished.

There were a few exceptions to the general rule that defeated Republicans graciously conceded.  Kari Lake, notoriously, refused to concede defeat in Arizona, denounced the outcome as fraudulent and sued to overturn the outcome. All of this deserves to be condemned but still looks more like performance art than a serious attempt to overturn the outcome.  Far more serious, but very much an outlier, was the case of Solomon Pena, a Republican who ran for a safe Democratic seat in the New Mexico legislature.  Pena attributed his loss to fraud, made complaints of fraud to two Democratic county commissioners and two Democratic legislators.  When they refused to take the complaints serious, Pena has some of his friends shoot at their houses!  Fortunately, no one was killed or injured.  Pena had a criminal record and appears to have gotten the nomination mostly because no other Republican wanted to run for such and obviously safe Democratic seat.  This suggests a need for better quality control, even for hopeless candidates, but it seems unlikely to be duplicated.

In light of all these encouraging results, I can see several possible conclusions:

1. The Republican threat to democracy was overblown.  Our side was panicking for nothing.
2. Republicans can handle losing down ballot elections, so long as they keep the presidency.
3. Trump is the problem. So long as Trump is not on the ballot, elections can proceed more or less normally.
4. The January 6 prosecutions have scared some sense into people who might otherwise challenge elections.

I guess we will learn the answer next year.

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*Actually, in fairness to the Democrats, they actually seem to have figured that out and sought to compete in state-level elections, especially for state legislature, in 2020.  They just weren't very successful.  
**In Pennsylvania the chief elections officer is appointed by the governor, rather than elected.  But Pennsylvania elected a Democrat as governor.